World Briefing | Asia: Pakistan: Religion Restored To Passports

By Salman Masood (NYT)

Published: March 25, 2005

Pakistanis will again be required to state their religion on their passports, the government said, after weeks of fierce protest from hard-line Islamist parties that saw the deletion as an attempt to secularize the country. The requirement of stating a religious affiliation was introduced in 1980, but President Pervez Musharraf's government removed it in October while installing new machine-readable passports. Salman Masood (NYT)